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Carrie (1976)



Director: Brian De Palma
Cast overview: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie
Running time: 98 minutes

This is one of several Stephen King novels adapted into TV and film, although I don't think it's my favourite. That honour would have to go to Misery, closely followed by The Shining. It's a well-told story, it succeeds in doing what it intends to, despite appearing to feel slightly unsure of itself at certain times, but I don't feel it breaks into the upper echelons of film simply by feeling at times like a dark comedy, rather than the serious horror film it was surely intended to be.

Sissy Spacek plays Carrie White, a teenage girl with the ability to use telekinesis, well, and Piper Laurie is terrific as her overbearing and nutty religious mother. There are also appearances of varying degrees of importance from John Travolta, PJ Soles - known for her role as Annie in Halloween (1978), and Edie McClurg, who would become famous in a Planes, Trains & Automobiles scene. The acting talent is there, and it's often seen, but the comedic and lowbrow elements of some parts of the film reduce it a bit for me.

Brian De Palma at the helm was a promising sign, and he uses many of his typical visual elements in this, but it doesn't - in my opinion, at least - stand up as one of his better films.

It starts off well, and appears to be an interesting and unusual horror film - by virtue of not really being one in the traditional sense - but soon loses its way for the middle third until a solid ending rounds things off. This is a decent film, but I think it's been slightly overrated by some, and I don't think it's among the strongest of Stephen King's adaptations.



Quotes
Margaret White: [Referring to Carrie's prom gown] Red. I might have known it would be red.
Carrie: It's pink, Mama.
[Presenting corsage]
Carrie: Look what Tommy gave me, Mama. Aren't they beautiful?
Margaret White: I can see your dirty pillows. Everyone will.
Carrie: Breasts, Mama. They're called breasts, and every woman has them.

Tommy Ross: [Points to a humiliated Carrie after the pig's blood is spilled on her; his voice is blocked out but viewers can clearly read his lips and tell that he is upset and yelling] WHAT THE HELL!

Margaret White: I should've killed myself when he put it in me. After the first time, before we were married, Ralph promised never again. He promised, and I believed him. But sin never dies. Sin never dies. At first, it was all right. We lived sinlessly. We slept in the same bed, but we never did it. And then, that night, I saw him looking down at me that way. We got down on our knees to pray for strength. I smelled the whiskey on his breath. Then he took me. He took me, with the stink of filthy roadhouse whiskey on his breath, and I liked it. I liked it! With all that dirty touching of his hands all over me. I should've given you to God when you were born, but I was weak and backsliding, and now the devil has come home. We'll pray.
Carrie: Yes.
Margaret White: We'll pray. We'll pray. We'll pray for the last time. We'll pray.

Trivia
Stephen King based Carrie White on two girls he knew while at school, both were social outcasts from deeply religious families and both died while still in their twenties.

Sissy Spacek asked Brian De Palma how he wanted her to react when Carrie first realizes that she is bleeding in the showers at the start and De Palma told her "It's like you've been hit by a truck." Spacek talked to her husband Jack Fisk (art director), who as a child had been run over by a car when he was standing in the streets looking at Christmas lights a neighbor had put up, and used his description of the experience as a basis for the scene.

Nancy Allen claims that she never realized that her character was going to be so evil until she saw the finished film, she thought that she and John Travolta were playing such self-centered, bickering morons that they were there for comic relief. Piper Laurie also thought that the character of Margaret White was so over the top that the film had to be a comedy.

Trailer